Resilience Is Not Jobs' One
If you ever get an iTunes gift card whose gummy gray scratch-off material has fossilized, loosen it up with a coin and then take some water to it before rubbing it firmly with your thumb. It won’t damage the card, and you have a better chance of seeing the numbers than if you go after it hardcore with a coin and scratch all the way through the top layer of the card’s surface. At least using a 50 kuruş coin, I can’t speak for quarters.
Having resurrected any troubled cards, I’m proud to say I have completed my Nickel Creek collection and vastly expanded my Alison Krauss and Union Station corpus.
iTunes is nice and all, but I think in the future I’m going to request Amazon MP3 credit instead. It’s ridiculous to have to download a 100 MB file for a frigging media player, forcing the installation of Quicktime and the satanic Apple Update (which can offer to “update” software you don’t have on your computer; honestly, how many people really want Safari on a Windows computer when Chrome runs off the same renderer?).
Bonjour is also now a forced installation, adding Apple networking sharing services to the vast array of things in that 100 MB that I wish I didn’t have. Plus, my poor netbook is gasping for air just keeping the store open and downloading. Chrome (not exactly known for being a resource hog or heavyweight) was struggling to load my website thumbnails on the startup page concurrently with an idling iTunes. Inexcusable.
Plus, as soon as I buy the songs I just convert them to mp3 with ffmpeg, tag them manually, embed album art manually, and merge them into my outside-iTunes collection. So, after all, I’m not exactly pitching my tent in the reality distortion field.